Undergraduate Language Course Research Articles

Self-assessment of academic writing in an online learning environment

Successful academic writing courses include self-assessment opportunities for foreign language learners. Encouraging students to actively engage with their own texts is even more relevant when courses are offered in a hybrid or entirely online learning environment. During distance education, when measuring learning is becoming problematic, students reflecting on and experimenting with their work can inform the teacher, but more importantly, can promote a deeper understanding of the writing process and the written product. An effective revision and self-editing of a draft requires top-down and bottom-up approaches to the text. This study discusses how students can assess their own writing on three levels: lexically, syntactically, and at the discourse level by incorporating corpus linguistic tools in their self-assessment process. This includes vocabulary profiling, evaluating cohesion and analysing variation in register and genres. The exercises are beneficial in undergraduate language courses and also in teacher and translator training.

Genre Instruction and Critical Literacy in Teacher Education: Features of a Critical Foreign Language Pedagogy in a University Curriculum

Author(s): Mitsikopoulou, Bessie | Abstract: This paper focuses on critical pedagogy and EFL teacher education and it argues that it would be unrealistic to expect students who have been educated through traditional university curricula (aiming to deliver content through a ‘banking model’) to become critical foreign language teachers and educators. The education of future teachers requires new university curricula which view literacy as a critical social practice and prepare them through transformative pedagogies, encouraging them to examine critically their values and beliefs by developing a reflexive knowledge base, an appreciation for multiple perspectives and a sense of critical consciousness and agency.Based on this premise, the article presents the case of Genres in English, an undergraduate language course at the Department of English Language and Literature of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, aiming to raise students’ critical literacy. Using the tools of Systemic Functional Grammar and drawing on a genre-based approach to writing development, the course initially invites students to take up the role of critical text analysts deconstructing academic and media texts and at a later stage to engage in a popularization of science writing task mediating information from an academic to a media text. Through language tasks which approach genres as historical constructs, students are introduced to the ideological nature of discourses and genres and they explore the conditions of production, distribution and consumption of texts. To evaluate the effectiveness of this approach, the paper presents the findings from a small-scale research conducted with students who have attended the course.

Teaching EFL to children: reflections on (future) teachers’ language assessment literacy

This article presents some reflections on the language assessment literacy of seven EFL undergraduates and one graduate teaching English to children in a university research project. The data were collected in a focus group and socio-discursively analyzed with the concept of voices underlying their answers. The voices identified were predominantly academic as the participants mirrored the knowledge and the discourse they have (had) contact with at the university. This showed full or partial appropriation of such discourses, indicating a language assessment literacy process going on. The findings highlight the tensions between the different kinds of knowledge that should be dealt with in language teacher education and the demands posed by the challenge of assessing children learning languages to the extent that they evidence problems that stem from lack of appropriate literacy assessment for this context. This is definitely a huge challenge in Brazil, as well as in many other places in the world, where undergraduate language courses have not been preparing future teachers to work with assessment.

A Genre Based Approach to Teaching B1 Level E-Mail Writing for the World of Work

In a professional world where communication technologies have become increasingly accessible and speed of delivery, as a result, is at a premium, it comes as little surprise that findings from a recent joint Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) / Cambridge Language Assessment study (2016) stress employers’ insistence on developing English language email writing skills as a priority, and this is particularly true of Italian companies. The implications of this need for specifically skill orientated, professional development in ESP writing are enormous but how far are they being reflected by the assessment criteria adopted by major examination boards and associations and, consequently, reflected in teaching practices? In Europe the ESP teaching field is increasingly informed by the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) but these descriptors may neglect the central role discourse elements play in contributing to an effective text. An interesting question to consider, then, is what type of washback is being created and whether or not a genre based approach, such as is common in approaches to EAP (Bhatia 1993; Swales 1990; Hyland 2008 ) might be effective when teaching email writing skills at B1 levels. This article, therefore, looks at some areas that are perhaps neglected and explores practical ways in which applying a genre based approach may foster awareness and improved production skills in B1 level email writing, focusing on how this has been carried out in undergraduate language courses with students studying Economics at Verona University.

Atividades de Proferição e Avaliação do Discurso (PAD) como instrumento de formação de professores - Doi: 10.5212/Uniletras.v.32i2.0004

This paper analyzes the application of an activity called “Production and Evaluation of Discourse” (in Portuguese PAD) in an Undergraduate Language Course. This activity was designed to demonstrate the importance of teachers being able to produce speech in order to persuade and convince pupils. The activity was created based on the fact that despite the subject matter taught good teachers produce certain instructional gestures (DOLZ et al., 2008) when they start a class and when they call students’ attention in order to motivate them to engage in the tasks proposed and maintain a high level of interest and readiness throughout the class. Moreover, a relationship of trust between teachers and students is kept, and the control of discipline and time allows the teacher to reach his or her goals and to finish the lesson in a satisfactory way.

Preferred genres and rhetorical modes in the humanities and social sciences

The article reports on a research project aimed at identifying salient written genres and text types/rhetorical modes in the Faculty of Humanities at a large university in Gauteng, South Africa. The main purpose of the research was to establish an empirical base for the design of intermediate-level undergraduate language courses. A survey was done by means of text analysis: study guides were requested from a representative sample of departments, after which writing prompts were identified and analysed using Wordsmith Tools. In terms of genre it has been established that the humanities prefer essays and critical analyses, while the social sciences prefer project reports and essays. The rhetorical modes required most frequently at undergraduate level are discussion, analysis, argumentation, explanation and description. Discussion, explanation and argumentation are favoured by academic essays, while description and evaluation are favoured by reports, and analysis, argumentation and discussion are favoured by critical analyses. Although most essays presuppose argumentation, it is often not explicated in writing prompts. Other complicating factors are the ambiguity and hidden assumptions associated with certain rhetorical verbs. The outcomes of the research suggest two possible approaches to designing writing courses for undergraduate students in the humanities and social sciences: a subject-specific and a semi-generic approach, of which the latter may be more feasible within the framework of a macro-university.

The undergraduate language course

The undergraduate language course